Linux for Poets

Open Source Nerding and Pondering



A note on writing space and focus

One of the big, obvious problems with trying to get anything done, ever, on the computer is distractions. Email, social whatnot, updates on any web site ever. It’s ridiculous. So, my new trick, that’s not a trick at all! Make a new account on your computer, and don’t put any distracting data in it! No email passwords, logins of any kind. Only the stuff you are working on. And give it a pretty desktop image that makes you feel zen and happy. You can use the same software from different accounts (on Mac at least). To be able to access your data from both places, you can do the lowtech, Dropbox route. For increasingly nerdy options, read on: I made a new partition on my Mac that I keep the data on, and then use the arRsync utility to synchronize it to my Documents folder in my main Mac account. That just syncs the two local folders. It doesn’t run automatically, I have to remember to push the button to sync it. And, because sometimes I like using Linux, I installed Linux Mint on my little 16GB USB thumb drive (this one is so tiny that I don’t have to take it out of my machine, it won’t get snagged on anything). And I use a program called Unison to sync it to the secondary partition on my harddrive. This makes it so I can fiddle with whichever OS I’m in the mood for. And my data is backed up on my harddrive and USB drive almost all the time. And if I wanted to boot the USB from another computer, I can. I do backups to cloud services that I think are safe occasionally. (Dropbox spooks me out, so I prefer to use Mega, or Spider Oak or Tresorit.